Walking Stick Z - Part 9 & Road Trip Photos

Today's blog post is primarily an update on the Walking Stick Z project.  I was able to find time this week to get outside and wood burn another strip of the Celtic Knot Work onto the walking stick.  I measured  my progress this time.  So far I have wood burned forty inches of knot work onto the stick.  I have thirty more inches more to go.  Then that portion of the project will be finished. 

I am still going back and forth about whether to wood burn a poem onto the project.  There is plenty of room to have a poem spiral around the walking stick.  I have been working on a poem, but at this point I have not come up with something that I think is satisfactory.  I keep getting little snippets of ideas, but nothing has gelled yet.

Completing the wood burning will not complete the project.  The stick will need some close sanding to remove a few mistakes made along the way.  The it will get a final sanding.  After that the knot work will be painted.  It takes a while to get the stick painted, but not nearly as long as the wood burning.  After that the stick will be stained with an antiquing medium.  Then the stick will be given a sealer coat. 

Wild Flowers

Watching a long term project like this is somewhat akin to watching paint dry.  I thought I'd add in a few more photos from my latest road trip to keep the post from being boring.  The photos are somewhat out of focus because they were taken from a moving vehicle.  By the time I see a shot that I want to take we have either come up on it too closely to get the picture in focus or have gone beyond the scene.

Road art: white cow

The field of wild flowers was on the road heading toward the cabin.  This was a relatively small patch of the flowers.  We drove by some fields of flowers that must have been the better part of an acre.  Between the wild flowers, golden rod, and ragweed it is no wonder I was having an allergy problem this year.

One of the photos is somewhat hard to interpret.  There is a life-size white fiberglass cow in front of a house.  I expect the farm is a cattle ranch.  Or perhaps the family that lives there just enjoys having a life size piece of road art in the front yard.  We come up on the scene so quickly that I have not been able to get a good picture of it yet.

The last picture is a white barn with a rusty
silo.  When we think of barns, the iconic image
that comes to mind is a red barn.  And it is
true that there are many red barns.  However,
I have found in my travels that I have seen
many more white barns than red barns.  It is a
case of our cultural ideal not necessarily matching reality.

I apologize to readers who see my blog on the Yahoo platform.  Lately Yahoo has been putting the photos in odd places on the email.  When I publish, the photos are all aligned on the right hand side.  I am not sure I can do anything about that.

Check back on Thursday for some pictures of another project I have in the works.